Who am I?

Who I am is Lee Cawley, a 25 year verteran of the games industry and 30+ years as a games/software developer.

I am an artist, designer and programmer with a portfolio of almost 70 games, numerous development tools and even some award winning software for Ericssons when I was a telecomms engineer, for TSM allocation at the exchange with cabling and documentation functionality included.

Assembly language experience on four processors, 6502, Z80, 68000 and 8086. Actionscript 2.0 and 3.0. Lingo, Java (J2ME), VB6 and .Net, along with C# for applications and some XNA games programming... plus a small amount of C.

3D experience with 3DS Max since version 3 and to a much lesser extent, Maya. 2D experience mainly in Photoshop and Pro-Motion (for 2D sprite-work and tile based level maps).

GTAV Script Mod Collection... Was here!

As my modding future is finite, this site will now evolve into a legacy site that reflects everything I have achieved and developed during the past few years as a GTAV Mod developer. I am still trying to push my boundaries to create greater things. Along with my German counterpart, we are striving to make things we enjoy, for the simple reason that we enjoy making them.

As I have always said, it only needs one person to enjoy what you create, to make that process worthwhile and rewarding. I am tired of getting angry about things I have no control over, because that eats up the time I could spend creating. So this is a site about development, about striving to make GTAV just that little bit more enjoyable.

These are my creations and this is what I am proud of... Creating is what I do, it is pretty much all I can do... and I have to try and enjoy doing it, while I still can. This page will evolve but the only content will be creative.

Here's a video made with several mods that I have been made over the last few months, including Ground Vehicle Effects v1.5.2.

This video is three sequences edited together in Sony Vegas. Each sequence was the same recording, played back with different parameters, to show how a recording isn't confined to the conditions it was recorded under, like the Rockstar Editor. It only records the player's vehicle though but it also works fully with all scrips and mods... including scripted particles, both looped and non-looped. This is combined with a camera editing mod that can set up and place cameras along the replay route.

Here's another new addition to a recent mod. This is a helicam to go with the camera placer and replay mod. It is an actual helicopter, not just a camera, which tracks and follows the player's vehicle. Even when you are not in that view, the helicopter is still in the scene, whch means under the right conditions, you can either see it in the shot, or see its shadow on the floor, which adds to the realism of the system. The helicam is a dynamic camera, so playing a replay twice will result in a different result each time. The other cameras provide consistent views, which is how I was able to seemlessly cut between sequences in the above video.

Here's the above sequence using the custom cameras for the majority of the video, instead of the helicam.

For some reason, YouTube has turned the quality of these videos to crap. They were 960x600 (half-size) videos at 5MB/s and they're now shitty quality 480p. And you can't replace videos, only delete and re-upload. *sigh*

Shortish video showing Circuit Mode in my replays and camera system. I can now define a sequence of cameras and tell the replay system that they are to be used as a continuous circuit, instead of a single linear sequence. These means I can run multiple laps around the GP circuit mods and get race-style replays on them. This is hopefully a better quality video than the last one, I recorded it at 1280x800.

Beyond the solitary vehicle... (Initial Prototype)

Create multiple compatible replays and then pick and choose which of those replays gets used. Just want helicopters. Just want cars? Want them all? Simply create a playback list, set the effects and watch it play. Soon to be added is the ability to select any of the playback vehicles as the one the player will use, which in turn will drive the custom replay camera system, for multi-vehicle custom replays.

New feature added to my replay system today, Follow the Leader mode.

Up till now, the camera changes have always been triggered by the player vehicle hitting the trigger points. But I sat today thinking about real racing videos, or police chases, where the camera might not always want to stay on the same vehicle. So this new feature allows the nearest vehicle to switch cameras, rather than the player. So in a race video, the camera can always switch to the leader. If you were making a police chase, you could set a camera away from the action, which would cut to a police helicopter or intercepting vehicle. If you did a military scene, you could cut to various vehicle types, simply by moving the camera trigger into their path instead of the player. It basically opens up a new level of freedom on what you can do with this replay system.

This is a short comparison video, the first section is with the cameras working as normal, the second section is with FTL mode switched on.

Well I spent all day today battling with multiplayer peds but I finally have these:

This is a pair of standalone addon peds, that are fully customisable with the full set of racing suits. So that's 2 peds in 14 branded suits, that can be used as AI drivers in my replay system.

To cut down on size, the YMT files have been stripped down to bare essentials. That means a single hairstyle for the woman and a bald head for the man. I tried to pick a female looking face for the woman, although that's a fair old task with the MP females. There are no additional drawable options, just the texture variants but by doing this, it means the suit can be configured with a single variant value, so I can pick a random number and then configure that complete suit based on that single number... which makes ensuring unique suits is easily done. So added to the unique livery option I added, it means that a race replay can be built with no copies of suits or liveries.

If I can ever work out how to get the helmets to work, I can avoid copied heads as well, they'll be hidden inside the helmet. Plus with a little bit of work, they can be expanded to add even more texture options to the suits. I think the one thing the ped collection was missing, were some that could be used in racing environments... not any more. :D

Since posting the original suit images, I have now created a fully matching set of glove textures for each suit. I also have the helmets working (in a fashion) so I now have proper AI racing drivers.

Okay... so these mods are done. I am going to post this one last playback video and then perhaps one more that shows a full sequence from recording, to camera placement, to playback. Then I am going to concentrate on some proper videos with them... no fun making things if you never use them... right?